The tone of this cultural essay is one of ecstatic gloom. North is where the light flees, where ghosts come from, where it is cold and drear. At least for those of us living above the equator: Davidson's book might be pedantically accused of hemispherism, since there is nothing about what South Americans or Australians might think of when they think of north. Still, the half of the world that he does cover is roamed in fascinating, suggestive fashion: from the north of Scotland, where the author lives, to Canada (the title comes from a famous radio documentary made by pianist Glenn Gould), Scandinavia, Greenland, China beyond its Wall, and Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan.

Davidson is as interesting writing about snow sculptures and 17th-century paintings of the Arctic as he is about Auden, and his reading of the imaginary land of Zembla in Nabokov's Pale Fire as an eternal, symbolic north is highly evocative. The author even gets away with describing some of his dreams. Unfortunately, in a fit of madness, the publisher has not seen fit to provide this lovely book with an index.

Cannabis: The Story of the Weed that Rocked the World, by Jonathon Green (Pavilion, £9.99)

"Is there anything left to be said on cannabis?" asks the press release, somewhat nervously. The answer, it seems, is not really; but this small and glossy tome does render the service of collecting a fair amount of information in one place, which might be useful if you are considering whether to vote Conservative, whose proposed upgrading of the drug to Class B will no doubt keep weed-crazed asylum-seekers from living at the Ritz at your expense. Thus you will learn that you need the rather large amount of 600mg of cannabis per kilo of bodyweight in order to kill a rat; that in 1975, the US Drugs Enforcement Administration banned research that appeared to show that cannabis can reduce tumours; and that its medicinal properties have been known to Chinese doctors for millennia. You can also look at a rather charming photograph of little girls smoking pot in a Jamaican church, and learn how to roll a joint, construct a bong, and grow cannabis plants yourself. Not that the author recommends you actually do any of this, of course.